see punished."
"That doesn't make sense. It can't be."
"It is." He felt sick. He looked at his hands, as if he might actually
find the truck driver's blood on them. "My God, I sent him after
Cooper."
He was so appalled, so psychologically oppressed by a sense of
responsibility for what had happened, that he wanted desperately to wash
his hands, scrub them until they were raw. When he tried to get up, his
legs were too weak to support him, and he had to sit right down again.
Lindsey was shocked and horrified, but she did not react to the news
story as strongly as Hatch did.
Then he told her about the reflection of the black-dressed young man in
sunglasses, which he had seen in the mirrored door in place of his own
image, last night in the den when he had been ranting about Cooper. He
told her, as well, how he lay in bed after she was asleep, brooding
about Cooper, and how his anger suddenly exploded into artery-popping
rage.
He spoke of the sense he'd had of being invaded and overwhelmed, ending
in the blackout. And for a kicker, he recounted how his anger had
escalated unreasonably as he had read the piece in Arts American earlier
this evening, and he took the magazine out of his nightstand to show her
the inexplicably scorched pages.
By the time Hatch finished, Lindsey's anxiety matched his, but dismay at
his secretiveness seemed greater than anything else she was feeling.
"Why'd you hide all of this from me?"
"I didn't want to worry you," he said, knowing how feeble it sounded.
"We've never hidden anything from each other before. We've always
shared everything. Everything."
"I'm sorry, Lindsey. I..... . it's just that... these last couple
months ... the nightmares of rotting bodies, violence, fire,... and
the last few days, all this wierdness...."
"From now on," she said, "there'll be no secrets."
"I only wanted to spare yon-"
"No secrets," she insisted.
"Okay. No secrets."
"And you're not responsible for what happened to Cooper. Even if there
is some kind of link between you and this killer, and even if that's why
Cooper became a target, it's not your fault. You didn't know that being
angry at Cooper was equivalent to a death sentence. You couldn't have
done anything to prevent it."
Hatch looked at the heat-seared magazine in her hands, and a shudder of
dread passed through him. "But it'll be my fault if I don't try to save
Honell."
Frowning, she said, "What do you mean?"
"If my anger somehow focused this guy on Cooper, why wouldn't it also
focus him on Honell?"
Honell woke to a world of pain. The difference was, this time he was on
the receiving end of it-and it was physical rather than emotional pain.
His crotch ached from the kick he'd taken. A blow to his throat had
left his esophagus feeling like broken glass. His headache was
excruciating.
His wrists and ankles burned, and at first he could not understand why;
then he realized he was tied to the four posts of something, probably
his bed, and the ropes were chafing his skin.
He could not see much, partly because his vision was blurred by tears
but also because his contact lenses had been knocked out in the attack.
He knew he had been assaulted, but for a moment he could not recall the
identity of his assailant.
Then the young man's face loomed over him, blurred at first like the
surface of the moon through an unadjusted telescope. The boy bent
closer, closer, and his face came into focus, handsome and pale, framed
by thick black hair. He was not smiling in the tradition of movie
psychotics, as Honell expected he would be. He was not scowling,
either, or even frowning. He was expressionless-except, perhaps, for a
subtle hint of that solemn professional curiosity with which an
of insect.
"I'm sorry for this discourteous treatment, sir, after you were kind
enough to welcome me into your home. But I'm rather in a hurry and
couldn't take the time to discover what I need to know through ordinary
conversation."
"Whatever you want," Honell said placatingly. He was shocked to hear
how drastically his mellifluous voice, always a reliable tool for
seduction and expressive instrument of scorn, had changed. It was
raspy, marked by a wet gurgle, thoroughly disgusting.
"I would like to know who Lindsey Sparling is," the young man said
dispassionately, "and where I can find her."
Hatch was surprised to find Honell's number in the telephone book. Of
course, the author's name was not as familiar to the average citizen as
it had been during his brief glory years, when he had published Mss
Culvert and Mrs. Towers. Honell didn't need to be worried about
privacy these days; evidently the public gave him more of it than he
desired.
While Hatch called the number, Lindsey paced the length of the bedroom
and back. She had made her position clear: she didn't think Honell
would interpret Hatch's warning as anything other than a cheap threat.
Hatch agreed with her. But he had to try.
He was spared the humiliation and frustration of listening to Honell's
reaction, however, because no one answered the phone out there in the
far canyons of the desert night. He let it ring twenty times.
He was about to hang up, when a series of images snapped through his
mind with a sound like short circuiting electrical wires: a disarranged
bed quilt; a bleeding, rope encircled wrist; a pair of frightened,
bloodshot, myopic eyes. .. and in the eyes, the twin reflections of a
dark face looming close, distinguished only by a pair of sunglasses.
Hatch slammed down the phone and backed away from it as if the receiver
had turned into a rattlesnake in his hand. "It's happening now."
The ringing phone fell silent.
Vassago stared at it, but the ringing did not resume.
He returned his attention to the man who was tied spread-eagle to the
brass posts of the bed. "So Lindsey Harrison is the married name?"
"Yes," the old guy croaked.
"Now what I most urgently need, sir, is an address."
The public telephone was outside of a cony store in a shopping center
just two miles from the Harrison house. It was protected from the
elements by a Plexiglas hood and surrounded by a curved sound shield.
Hatch would have preferred the greater privacy of a real booth, but
those were hard to find these days, a luxury of less cost-conscious
times.
He parked at the end of the center, at too great a distance for anyone
in the glass-fronted convenience store to notice-and perhaps This
license number.
He walked through a cool, blustery wind to the telephone. The center's
Indian laurels were infested with the winds, and drifts of dead, tightly
curled leaves blew along the pavement at Hatch's feet. They made a dry,
scuttling sound. In the urine-yellow glow of the parking-lot ights,
they almost looked lik
e hordes of insects, queerly mutated their
subterranean hive.
The convenience store was not busy, and everything else in the shopping
center was closed. He hunched his shoulders and head into the pay phone
sound shield, convinced he wouldn't be overheard.
He did not want to call the police from home, because he knew they had
equipment that printed out every caller's number at their end. If they
found Honell dead, Hatch didn't want to become their prime suspect.
And if his concern for Honell's safety proved to be unfounded, he didn't
want to be on record with the police as some kind of nut case or
hysteric.
Even as he punched in the number with one bent knuckle and held the
handset with a Kleenex to avoid leaving prints, he was uncertain what to
say.
He knew what he could not say: Hi, I was dead eighty minutes, then
brought back to life, and now I have this crude but at times effective
telepathic connection to a psychotic killer, and I think I should warn
you he is about to strike again. He could not imagine the authorities
taking him any more seriously than they would take a guy who wore a
pyramid-shaped aluminum-foil hat to protect his brain from sinister
radiation and who bothered them with complaints about evil, mind-warping
extraterrestrials next door.
He had decided to call the Orange County Sheriff's Department rather
than any particular city's police agency, because the crimes committed
by the man in sunglasses fell in several jurisdictions. When the
sheriff's operator answered, Hatch talked fast, talked over her when she
began to interrupt, because he knew they could trace him to a pay phone
given enough time. "The man who killed the blonde and dumped her on the
freeway last week is the same guy who killed William Cooper last night,
and tonight he's going to murder Steven Honell, the writer, if you don't
give him protection quick, and I mean right now. Honell lives in
Silverado Canyon, I don't know the address, but he's probably in your
jurrisdiction, and He's a dead man if you don't move now."
He hung up, turned away from the phone, and headed for his car, jamming
the Kleenex into his pocket. He felt less relieved than he had expected
to, and more of a fool than seemed reasonable.
On his way back to the car, he was walking into the wind. All the
laurel leaves, sucked dry by the winds, were now blown toward him
instead of with him. They hissed against the blacktop and crunched
under his shoes.
He knew that the trip had been a waste and that his effort to help
Honell had been ineffective. The sheriff's department would probably
treat it like just another crank call.
When he got home, he parked in the driveway, afraid that the clatter of
the garage door would wake Regina His scalp prickled when he got out of
the car. He stood for a minute, surveying the shadows along the house,
around the shrubbery, under the trees. Nothing.
Lindsey was pouring a cup of coffee for him when he walked into the
kitchen.
He took it, sipped gratefully at the hot brew. Suddenly he was colder
than he had been while standing out in the night chill.
"What do you think?" she asked worriedly. "Did they take you
seriously?"
"Pissing in the wind," he said.
Vassago was still driving the pearl-gray Honda belonging to Renata
Desseux, the woman he had overpowered in the mall parking lot on
Saturday night and later added to his collection. It was a fine car and
handled well on the twisting roads as he drove down the canyon from
Honell's place, heading for more populated areas of Orange County.
As he rounded a fairly sharp curve, a patrol car from the sheriff's
department swept past him heading up the canyon. Its siren was not
blaring, but its emergency beacons splashed red and blue light on the
shale banks and on the gnarled branches of the overhanging trees.
He divided his attention between the winding road ahead and the
dwindling lights of the patrol car in his rear-view mirror, until it
rounded another bend upslope and vanished. He was sure the cop was
going to Honell's. The unanswered madly ringing telephone, which had
interrupted his interrogation of the author, was the trigger that had
set the sheriff's department in motion, but he could not figure how or
why.
Vassago did not drive faster. At the end of Silverado Canyon, he turned
south on Santiago Canyon Road and maintained the legal speed limit as
any good citizen was expected to do.
8
In bed in the dark, Hatch felt his world crumbling around him. He was
going to be left with dust.
Happiness with Lindsey and Regina was within hisgrasp. Or was that an
illusion? Were they immediately beyond his reach?
He wished for an insight that would give him a new perspective on these
apparently supernatural events. Until he could understand the nature of
the evil that had entered his life he could not fight it.
Dr. Nyebern's voice spoke softly in his mind: I believe evil is a very
real force, an energy quite apart from us' a presence in the word He
thought he could smell a lingering trace of smoke from the heat-browned
pages of Arts American. He had put the magazine in the desk in the den
downstairs, in the drawer with a lock. He had added the small key to
the ring he carried.
He had never locked anything in the desk before. He was not sure why he
had done so this time. protecting evidence, he'd told himself.
But evidence of what? The singed pages of the magazine proved nothing
to anyone about anything.
No. That was not precisely true. The existence of the magazine proved,
to him if to no one else, that he wasn't merely imagining and
hallucinating everything that was happening to him. What he had locked
away, for his own peace of mind, was indeed evidence. Evidence of his
sanity.
Beside him, Lindsey was also awake, either uninterested in sleep or
unable to find a way into it. She said, "What if this killer Hatch
waited. He didn't need to ask her to finish the thought, for he knew
what she was going to say. After a moment she said just what he
expected: "What if this killer is aware of you as much as you're aware
of him?
What if he comes after you... us... Regina?"
"Tomorrow we're going to start taking precautions."
"What precautions?"
"Guns, for one thing."
"Maybe this isn't something we can handle ourselves."
"We don't have any choice."
"Maybe we need police protection."
"Somehow I don't think they'll commit a lot of manpower to protect a guy
just because he claims to have a supernatural bond with a psychotic The
wind that had harried laurel leaves across the shopping center parking
lot now found a loose brace on a section of rain gutter and worried it.
Metal creaked softly against metal.
Hatch said, "I went somewhere when I died, right?"
"What do you mean?"
"Purgatory, Heaven, Hell-those are the basic possibilities for a
Catholic,
if what we say we believe turns out to be true."
"Well... you've always said you had no near-death experience."
"I didn't. I can't remember anything from... the Other Side. But that
doesn't mean I wasn't there."
"What's your point?"
"Maybe this killer isn't an ordinary man."
"You're losing me, Hatch."
"Maybe I brought something back with me."
"Back with you?"
"From wherever I was while I was dead."
"Something?"
Darkness had its advantages. The superstitious primitive within could
speak of things that would seem too foolish to voice in a well-lighted
place.
He said, "A spirit. An entity."
She said nothing.
"My passage in and out of death might have opened a door somehow," he
said, "and let something through."
"Something," she said again, but with no note of inquiry in her voice,
as there had been before. He sensed that she knew what he meant-and did
not like the theory.
"And now it's loose in the world. Which explains its link to me-and why
it might kill people who anger me."
She was silent awhile. Then: "If something was brought back, it's